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#George Heriot's school and Greyfriars kirkyard and Edinburgh Old College from the air
the-busy-ghost · 2 years
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I’m looking at Gordon’s seventeenth century map of Edinburgh now and there’s a particularly distinct difference between the old (formerly separate) burghs of Edinburgh and the Canongate that I never noticed before now. Yes the two are separated by a wall and they have some other differences but the most striking thing to me is that in Edinburgh they built on the backland. 
So along the part of what is now the Royal Mile that runs through the Canongate, there are long strips of garden behind each tenement. This is a pattern which was very common on the high street of a lot of Scottish burghs- one example which immediately springs to mind is Brechin, where you can still see gardens sloping down to the water if you walk along Skinner’s burn, which presumably conform to the ancient burgage plots. Alternatively, here’s Gordon’s map of the north-east burgh of Aberdeen, where you can see long thin gardens behind most of the houses:
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(Detail from a map of Aberdeen, c.1661)
But once the Royal Mile enters Edinburgh IMMEDIATELY the situation changes. At the back of every five, six, even seven-storey tenement is yet more buildings and this is especially evident on the north side of the high street, where the ground slopes down to what was once the Nor’ Loch (and which is now occupied by Waverley Station and Princes Street Gardens). So not only did they have to build upwards in Edinburgh, they also had to build back on to the land included in the original toft. Compared to somewhere like London, seventeenth century Edinburgh was not that big but the population was extremely densely concentrated. The town is still famous for its tall closely packed buildings but even compared to other Scottish burghs it must have been distinctive, and I’d never realised the difference was so stark until I really looked closely and compared it side by side with the neighbouring burgh of Canongate. 
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(Detail from a map of Edinburgh and Canongate c.1647 - I’ve drawn a red line at the point at the boundary between the two burghs, near a set of buildings that stick out into the street and which probably include the building now known as John Knox’s house)
I know I’m not saying anything particularly new it’s just such a distinct and stark difference that I hadn’t even thought about properly until I saw it so I had to babble. Personally I thought that, having been in Dunbar’s Close Garden and some of the other areas around the back of the Canongate, you can still *feel* the contrast with somewhere like Fleshmarket Close, even if you can’t necessarily see it. Of course that’s just my opinion, and certainly slum clearance up in the old town has opened up some of the areas behind the upper end of the Royal Mile while conversely modern buildings have covered a lot of the old backlands of the Canongate. But idk I just thought it was really cool. (I’m also enjoying looking at the Lawnmarket and trying to work out which of these really tall old buildings is Gladstone’s Land). 
Both images are reproduced with permission of the National Libraries of Scotland. Here is the source for the Aberdeen map and here is the Edinburgh map
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